Thursday, 6 January 2011

Google Advert

A while back I registered Liverpool Kendo Club as a business with Google. This means when you zoom into The Egg on Google Maps we have a little marker that hopefully has been seen by people browsing the area [7420 views since I set it up in June and 562 clicks for 'More info' or click-thru to our website!]. This then links through to another page in Google Places which has a descritption, links, reviews, pictures and videos of the club to drive traffic to our Beginner's Nights. Hopefully it has, the success of our recent Beginner's Nights back this up. Although not many people [here I mean none] have filled in my simple survey to find out how they discovered the club.

One of the unexpected benefits of this was Google sent us a £50 voucher for Google Adwords. So I set up a campaign to advertise our upcoming Beginner's Night on Wednesday 26th January. Half the voucher will be used to promote this event, the other half will be used to promote the British Kendo Association Kyusha Taikai and Seminar we're hosting in Liverpool on April 2nd and 3rd.

So, if you do a Google search [or map search] for 'Liverpool' and 'kendo', for instance, you might see a little box at the top of your search results saying:

So far there have been over 1,400 views of this advert in 3 days, which isn't bad and that translates to 7 clicks through to our website. It's very exciting and when I see the advert I do get an urge to click it myself. I shouldn't have to explain to you all but this would be a mistake. Every click costs part of the advertising budget. So, I would ask if you do see the advert you now know what's going on behind the scenes and please resist the temptation to click it.